Barack Obama's Work in Progress

Continued (page 3 of 5)

"I just can't get it down on paper," he confesses to Valerie Jarrett in 1992. "I'd much rather hang out with Michelle than focus on this." It occurs to Jarrett, seeing her talented friend struggle to come to terms with his father and his racial identity and his Larger Purpose, that this is the first time Barack Obama has ever undertaken anything that tests his limits. He seeks refuge at a friend's place in Wisconsin, but homesickness for his soon-to-be bride soon lures him back to Chicago. Meanwhile, his editors at Poseidon are hounding him for copy. His due date is June 15, 1992. By the spring, Obama is starting to spit out the pages, but there's no way he's going to come close to meeting the deadline. It passes. On October 3, he marries Michelle.

Seventeen days later, Poseidon terminates his contract for failing to meet his deadline.

And suddenly Barack Obama's story becomes a familiar one—that of the author who took a significant book advance but failed to deliver and is now thoroughly, mercilessly forgotten. (Even to this day. "I don't recall a blessed thing," says Elaine Pfefferblit, the Poseidon editor who acquired Obama's book. Says the former editorial director at Poseidon, Ann Patty, who killed a book that now has more than 3 million copies in print, "Did it ever come in? Did we ever read it? I'm sure if I read and rejected it, I'd remember. I remember paying him!") But Obama's literary career is lifted from the shoals by the enterprising Dystel, who resells the book to Times Books for a far smaller advance—$40,000, according to his new editor, Henry Ferris—which Obama uses to fulfill his outstanding financial obligation to Poseidon.

Now he's got to produce. But how? He floats the idea to Jarrett: He'll go to Bali. "What do you think Michelle's gonna say when I tell her I've gotta go?" he asks her nervously. What Michelle says is, Uh, didn't we just get married? She certainly can't come along—she's got a job and they're broke and just back from their honeymoon... Fine, Barack. Whatever. As the first lady now says, "He needed to go and get it done so that we could move on with our lives."

In early 1993, Obama returns to Indonesia, the land of his childhood. And there he reenacts a common artistic ritual, albeit one that remains largely an unknown part of his biography, until now: He sequesters himself in a rental cottage on the crescent of Bali's Sanur Beach, where for a month he is a lone figure pacing on the white sand and hammering on his laptop, as unknown as he will ever be.

The July 1995 publication of Dreams from My Father is unremarkable. Beyond the dozen favorable reviews and the 10,000 or so copies sold, all that remains among the staff of Times Books are threadbare memories: of a skinny guy in chinos dropping by the office, of a deep and pleasant voice on the phone, of the vaguest sense of satisfaction with the book. For the author's part, he is unbothered by the meager bookstore appearances, the lack of so much as a single NPR interview, the obscurity of the midlist memoirist. After defeating the writer's block and rustling through hard questions of identity, he's quite pleased with the whole experience. This, at least, is what he conveys to a new friend, best-selling fiction author and fellow Chicagoan Scott Turow, who now says, "He had enjoyed writing the book a great deal more than maybe he had expected to."

Obama had in fact been so taken with it, says Turow, that "this is my gloss, but it does make me wonder what would've happened had [then incumbent state senator] Alice Palmer decided not to give up that seat. For even after he was elected and I would talk to him when he was in Springfield, he still had some doubts about whether being an elected official was what he wanted to do. We would talk about books. He would ask me what I was writing. And my gut was that it was more than a sort of generalized yearning—that he'd been thinking for some time since Dreams about what he would like to write, and even if it was no more than making a few notes, he was actively pursuing something.... A writer's life still beckoned to him."

···

Sometime in 2002, the young state senator pays a daytime visit to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The artistic director, Barbara Gaines, is happy to show the politician around. Watching the carpenters erect the set, he asks Gaines which play is about to be performed. "Julius Caesar," she tells him.

At first, Obama doesn't say anything. Then, in a very soft voice, he begins to recite some twenty lines from the play. As he does so, he places his hand on his heart, as if stricken by the words' transcendent beauty.

The director is agog. She has never heard an elected official quote Shakespeare in such a way. Later, she tells a co-worker, "I just had the most amazing experience. I met the first politician to have the soul of a poet." (The first, she means, since Abe Lincoln, who quoted lines from Macbeth less than a week before his assassination: I think our country sinks beneath the yoke...)

When he is done, she murmurs, "Where did you learn that?"

He smiles. "From great professors," he says. (Obama read all of Shakespeare's tragedies during a short span of time in college and reread several while in Springfield.)

Two years later, she invites him to another of the theater's productions, The Merry Wives of Windsor. But its premiere is September 2004, and Barack Obama can't make it because he's much in demand after having recently delivered the keynote address to the Democratic convention—the largest audience of his life. By then a book editor named Rachel Klayman has discovered that the rights to the long-forgotten memoir from which Obama's speech was partially cribbed belong to her publishing house, Crown Books, an imprint of Random House. Moving with a swiftness almost unheard of in the annals of publishing, Crown crashes a print run of 50,000 paperback copies. And one month and two days after the keynote address, Dreams from My Father enters the New York Times best-seller list.